Читать книгу BZRK: RELOADED - Майкл Грант - Страница 11

Vincent felt the laugh building inside him. It was like a build-up of steam in a covered pot. Like a volcano whose time to erupt has come at last.

He was being torn apart.

His arms were handcuffed to two parked diesel locomotives, and they were huffing and puffing, and smoke was coming up out of their undercarriages, and the locomotives were so hot that the steel side panels were melting.

He stood there between the tracks.

The chains were long. The engines would be able to build up speed.

“Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

He laughed, because it would be funny when his arms were ripped from his body, when the flesh tore and the bones popped out of their sockets like pulling the wings off a barbecued chicken and . . .

“Come on, man, lie down, lie down, lie down.”

Choo choo. Choo chooooooo!

“You’re going to be okay, Vincent.”

Who was Vincent? His name was not Vincent. His name was . . . What was his name?

A dragon, one of those Chinese dragons, loomed over him, a giant face, and there was smoke coming out of its nostrils and it was the same as the smoke from the trains that were starting to move now, starting to pick up speed, now.

“Uh. Uh-uh-uh! Uh! Uhhhh! UUHHH!”

The chains clanked as the trains pulled away.

“Take this pill. Take the pill, Vincent.”

Vincent thrashed, had to free his arms, they would rip his arms off, his arms would be dragged off behind the trains!

“Uhhh-uhhh-UUUHHHH!”

“Goddamn it, take the pill!”

The dragon was ripping his mouth open; he was going to split Vincent’s head open so that brains came gushing out of his mouth, vomiting his own brains and . . .

The Chinese dragon was a nurse now, no, a dragon, no, no, no.

“Nooooo!”

A vice closed around his head. He smelled a masculine perfume. Vincent felt muscles like pythons around his head and something was in his mouth, and the dragon/nurse held his jaw shut even as he tried to scream and beg for help.

“Keats. Help me! Get water.”

From the sky came a bottle.

Fiji water. Oh, yes, that was the one with a square bottle, sure he would drink some water, yes, dragon, I’ll drink some water like a good boy.

“Get his mouth open.”

But the trains!

Vincent swallowed.

A voice he heard very, very clearly but through his head not his ears said, “They’ll kill you, they’ll have no choice, they’ll kill you, kill you, the mad king will send the mad emperor. Kill. You.”

But then his arms were ripped from their sockets—Snap! Pop!—by the trains and he laughed and laughed.

And he felt sick.

He wanted to throw up.

“Like my brother,” a voice said.

The dragon, who was really just a man who smelled like perfume, had an arm around Vincent’s head. The man was crying. So Vincent felt like crying, too.

The other one, Vincent thought maybe he was a devil, he wasn’t sure, he might have devil skin, and he had devil blue eyes.

“I don’t have arms anymore, Jin,” Vincent whispered.

“Jesus,” the possible devil with blue eyes said.

Jin—Nijinsky, the dragon, the nurse—didn’t say anything.

The drug came for Vincent. It called him to unconsciousness. As he tumbled, armless, down the long, long black well, Vincent had a moment of clarity.

So, he thought, this is madness.

She stood in the doorway, ready to help if Nijinksy and Keats had trouble getting Vincent into restraints.

Ready to help. Her heart was beating as if it was made out of lead. That beat, that unnatural beat squeezed the air out of her lungs; it clamped her throat.

Sadie McLure—Plath—had been just a little bit in love with Vincent. He had that effect on people. Not love love, not even attraction in the usual sense of the word—that feeling was reserved for Keats, who was working silently, quickly, to tie Vincent down. Keats looked as shell-shocked as Plath felt.

So, not love love and not attraction for Vincent, but some weird amalgam of protectiveness and trust. Strange to feel that way about someone as cold-blooded as Vincent, someone so utterly in control. Well, formerly in control.

Her fists clenched so tight that her neglected fingernails cut new and too-short lifelines into her palms. She had taken too many hits, too many losses: her mother, her father and brother. What was left to her now?

They said what didn’t kill you made you stronger. No, it left you with holes blown through your soul. It left you like Vincent.

Plath had been recruited by Vincent. She had trusted Vincent, trusted him even with her life. And at the same time there had always been the feeling that she should take care of him, not out of reciprocity, not because it was owed, but just because there was something in that impassive face, in those dark eyes that spoke to her and said, Yes, I need.

Plath knew she was not alone in this. The others, all of them, felt it.

But that Vincent, the cool, calm, relentless one whom you nevertheless wanted to shelter, that Vincent was not here any longer.

Madness.

Insanity.

It had been an abstraction, but now she saw it. Now she felt it, and brave Plath was no longer quite so brave.

She turned away, unable to watch any longer.

Ophelia would have laughed at the idea that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Her legs were gone, one at the knee, one six inches higher. She was not stronger.

But worse, like Vincent she had lost her biots. Had Ophelia been capable of rational thought she might have contemplated the comparison between legs, actual, physical legs, and the biots, which were not, after all, exactly original equipment for any human.

Her legs had burned like candles, melted like wax, down to the bone. They’d amputated the barbecued stumps in the OR there at Bellevue Hospital. But her biots were dead long before that, incinerated in the terrible disaster at the United Nations. By the time doctors had taken what was left of her legs, what was left of her mind wasn’t much.

Ophelia was guarded by FBI agents who labeled her a terrorist suspect. There was one just outside the door to her hospital room, and one at each end of the hallway, and one at the nurse’s station. So, had Ophelia been sane, she probably would have been surprised to see a man standing at the foot of her bed who was obviously not a doctor, despite his white coat. Underneath the white coat was a faded, lilac velour blazer. His usual jaunty top hat had been set aside somewhere, but he still had Danny Trejo’s face.

Caligula—he had no other known name—came close to her, stood beside her. Ophelia gazed up at him and in a moment of clarity, a brief gap between the painkillers and the mental anguish, seemed almost to recognize him.

“You?”

“Yes, Ophelia.”

“Did? Are, uh . . . Did?” she asked. It was not a coherent question, but Caligula answered as though it was, as though she could understand, even though her eyes had rolled up into her head and a manic grin had distorted her lips.

“Wilkes got out. The others are alive.” And then he said, “You did good, Ophelia. You were brave.”

He put a palm on her forehead, a gesture that was tender but not, because he used the pressure to hold her head still as with a single swift motion he buried the dagger to the hilt in her temple.

From his pocket he withdrew a small cylinder ending in a pointed valve. He pulled the knife out and pushed the valve into the hole. He opened the valve and let his own special mixture of white phosphorus flow into her brain.

An autopsy might just conceivably produce evidence of nanotechnology, and it was part of Caligula’s brief to stop that from happening. That, and a mad Ophelia might eventually, in some disjointed rant, have given up a deadly secret or two.

The only survivor of the UN massacre in custody was now no longer available for questioning.

By the time Caligula left the room Ophelia’s eye sockets were dripping liquid fire.